Reveling in days of silence or retreat during more than half of the month
I wander around exploring how the balancing between being in solitude and being with others keeps changing shape for me.
Leaves on the Sycamores outside my door are bright gold and falling daily. Small splashes of riotous (for southern California) fall color are part of the radiant vista as I stroll a favorite twilight trail that overlooks our little town. Days have cooled now to our winter temperatures (mostly in the high 50’s and low 60’s). They dawn crisp and clear or (for a little while) foggy gray with drenching much welcomed rains. This morning, for the first time this season, the dew on the rain fly of my tent-bedroom had frozen in a thin film of ice. All the rose bushes around my cottage, abundant with lavish buds and blossoms, are joyously having one last fling before they get pruned back for “winter.”
Blessedly, I’ve spent 17 of the 30 days of November either in unplugged time or on my annual 10-day birthday retreat at home. I’m such a glutton for silence these days! And now, here I am having yet another unplugged week just the other side of the Thanksgiving workweek. such a bounty of peace and solitude! Such welcome respite in this season when everything and everyone is beginning to rev up for the coming holidays. When there’s so much madness in every quarter of the world and endless horrors being perpetrated in the name of “keeping us safe.”
In this time-out-of-time, especially during my retreat, I’ve spent endless hours wandering trails in the hills and mountains of Ojai. Surrounded by the rain-encouraged greening that so oddly marks the coming of winter in southern California. As I meander through the landscape of this magical place in which I live, I’m sometimes meandering through my own internal landscape as well.
Part of the time I feel totally merged with the awesome beauty of the layers and layers of mountains, the sounds of mountain “silence,” the profound nourishment of vistas with no sign of human intrusion. Then the sound of my own footsteps, the sense of my own body in motion breaks the almost trance-like state. I become more separate at those moments, a visitor rather than a part of it all. When I stop moving, I am blended into the all-ness again. I play with the border between walking and stopping. Caught up in exploring how it might be possible to carry the experience I have in the stillness into the moving times.
A spontaneous reflection or some momentary conscious noticing of the particular quality of my merged experience can also break that trance-like state. It’s always so shocking to notice that consciously noticing my experience completely changes that experience. I’m moved out of the union into my reflections, my process-mind. While some parts of me thoroughly delight in the experience of meandering with my reflections/my conscious process, other parts of me keenly feel the loss of the sense of union/merged-ness/no-self. Here, too, I dance at a border: the edge between the just being and the reflecting on the wonder of that just being.
I notice how the writing of these monthly columns and the sharing with my closest friends contribute to the “noticing” moments. It’s as though there’s a “story-teller” voice that comes onto the scene and begins to put words to the experience I’ve just been lost in. I so love this “story-teller.” She’s a miraculous companion who’s lived with me forever. She’s always been an incredibly facile translator of the intense, complex, often inchoate world that is my inner emotional life. She gives me words and ways to name, to speak about what might otherwise have stayed always locked, unformed inside of me. It’s her skill that enables me to help others to hear and name and communicate their own often wordless inner experience.
Yet, when she emerges to name and tell the story of my experience of being lost in the moment, she takes me from that moment. Takes me from that holy experience into a wholly different one! At the moment of the shift, I feel so sad, so bereft, and sometimes so crabby! I miss the “lost-into” feeling.
It’s a familiar theme. One that repeats in many quarters of my life. Always I am drawn to the stillness, to the expandedness, the boundarylessness, the lost-into-ness that I feel in stillness or in solitude. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m lost-into wandering in the mountains, wandering in the night to the creeks or around the groves or lost-into gardening, household chores, writing, ruminating, errands or whatever. I spend so much of my time melted into whatever I’m doing, without thought or reflection. (Unless, of course, what I’m melted into is thought and reflection!) In solitude it seems that anything I do allows me the opportunity to be lost-into just itself. There is no separation, no self-consciousness, nothing but the lostness in the doing or in the experiencing.
And inevitably, I’m also engaged in the practice and the challenge of exploring how to incorporate this delicious experience into the world of interacting with others. Sometimes it’s easier than other times. Sometimes I feel so separate, like a visitor in the world of ordinary human sharing. A competent, even reasonably comfortable visitor, but a visitor nonetheless. To that me, it often feels as though I am losing or giving up something precious (the no-separation) by sharing or by sharing about my experiences. Even when the sharing is with the incredibly precious friends with whom I’m the closest.
Other times with these beloved and kindred souls, the experience of sharing the moment–or sharing the stories of some of each of our other moments–brings some extraordinarily sweet richness, dimensionality and counterpoint. These times I delight in. They grow me. Yet, always in me there’s this repeating push-pull about spending time with others when I could be spending that time with just myself!
So much has changed in me this year about how being with people (friends or family) affects me. I’m no longer exhausted by the intensity of my “non-work” sojourns with others. I seem able not to absorb others’ energies in the ways that I have for so much of my life till now. I’m able to move so much more flowingly between being with others and being in my solitude. I’m able to move more smoothly through the transitions in either direction. All of this seems rather miraculous to me! I still don’t quite understand how this enormous shifting has come into being. My best guess is that some combination of a year and a half’s worth of both ongoing Feldenkrais body releasing work and regular once monthly week-long chunks of unplugged time are sourcing these extraordinary changes in me.
It’s certainly easier than ever to be with friends or family, to be in very different with-other realities. Yet there is still so much back and forth-ing in me about choosing to spend time away from solitude. And then, odd moments happen! In the middle of my birthday retreat, on the day of my actual birthday–a day I haven’t shared with anyone in almost 20 years–I actually had and acted on an urge to call a particular friend! It came as a complete shock to both of us that I actually wanted to ask her to come to Ojai and share dinner with me at a little down home and funky family-style Italian restaurant!
What was truly wonderful about it all was that she was actually free to come–after doing some errands she had to deal with first. Even more extraordinary was the fact that we both understood (and both completely accepted) that by the time she actually got here–some almost three hours later–I might no longer be in the mood to really want her here! She was completely willing to make the hour’s trip from Santa Barbara knowing that she might get here only to have to turn right around and go back home.
Knowing that she was saying yes to coming all that way–even though she knew that the “who” I might be when she got here could be a totally other “who” than the “who” that had called her–was what allowed me to risk the asking at all! Spirit really “fooled with us” big time along the way. The timing went awry. She was later than she thought she’d be finishing her errands. She was behind slow drivers the whole way. She had trouble getting through to leave me a message.
I was feeling completely disoriented and out of sorts once I got her message. I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself now that our timing wasn’t “matching.” I got really cranky and tantrumy about my having interfered with my own otherwise deliciously flowing day. I was very crabby having to figure out how not to be “waiting” for her in the middle of my birthday day. I felt like calling her on her cell phone and telling her to not bother, to turn around wherever she was and forget the whole misbegotten idea. But, it was clear to me that Spirit had a hand in it, so I didn’t call her. And, after a bit I actually got back on track. Into my own solitary evening instead of into the “waiting for her” mode.
She knew, as she surrendered into what was clearly Spirit’s interference, that I would probably be in just such a snit. She knew I’d be feeling as though she were ruining my birthday. That I would be feeling confirmed that it was a stupid idea to ever include anyone in my birthday day celebration. She knew she might really be “in for it” when she got to my door. But she just continued on her way here ready for whoever might greet her at the door.
And, it actually worked! We shared the stories of the getting to the moment of her arrival and roared with laughter at it all. It truly amazed both of us that we had come the distances we had come in our friendship and understanding of each other that we could both take the risks we did. Dinner was perfect and just exactly what I’d wanted. And, I was even able to want to know a little about some extraordinary experience she’d just been through that didn’t have to do with me my birthday or my retreat!
I don’t know that I would ever do it again even though it worked so well. (The miracle of having a friend who’d be free on such short notice, fully aware of the risks inherent and utterly willing to deal with whatever notwithstanding!) And, I had to live with (and not obsess over) a very odd bit of “leftover loose end” from the evening. I realized only after she’d left that I had been being gratuitously mean toward her in some very sensitive-for-her space. When my retreat ended, I called to let her know what I’d realized.
I trust that “more will be revealed” to me both about the where in me that that came from and the why of it as well. I remind myself to stay open to the knowing that will surely come, now that I am awake to this icky behavior. I remind myself not to go off into the old practiced thinking/analyzing pursuit that will only tangle and exhaust me.
So as this year comes to an end, I feel that much is in motion, germinating, as yet neither fully conscious nor clearly visible. I am filled with such gratitude for the profound and abundant gifts that fill my days. I am enormously grateful to Spirit for the blessings of rest and gentle growth that, for the most part, have been the flavor of this year.
My heart is filled with the hope for Peace and Healing for all Humankind and all Beings on our beleaguered Planet!
Originally published December 2003
